I want to highlight two incredibly valuable papers, although they are increasingly dated.

One paper reports on an enormous project in which observers went into a large sample of US first grade classrooms (827 of them in 295 districts) and simply recorded what was happening. The other paper reported on a comparable project for third grade classrooms (780 students in 250 districts)

Both papers are a treasure trove of information, but I want to highlight one striking datum: the percentage of time spent on science.

In first grade classrooms it was 4%. In third grade classrooms it was 5%.

There are a few oddities that might make you wonder about these figures. In the 1st grade paper, the observations typically took place in the morning, so perhaps teachers tend to focus on ELA in the morning and save science for the afternoon. But the third grade project sampled throughout the day.

And although there's always some chance that there's something odd about the method, the estimates accord with estimates using other measures, such as teachers' estimates. (See data from an NSF project here.) And before you blame NCLB for crowding science out of the classroom, note that the data for these studies were collected before NCLB. (1st grade, mostly '97-98; 3rd grade, mostly '00-'01). I don't think there's much reason to suspect that the time spent on science instruction has increased, and smaller scale studies indicate it hasn't.

The fact that so little time is spent on science is, to me, shocking.

It's even more surprising when paired with the observation that US kids fare pretty well in international comparisons of science achievement.

In 2003, when more or less the same cohort of kids took the TIMMS US kids ranked 6th in science. (They ranked 5th in 2008.)

How are US kids doing fairly well in science in the absence of science instruction?

Possibly US schools are terribly efficient in science instruction and get a lot done in minimum time.Possibly other countries are doing even less.Possibly US culture offers good support for informal opportunities to learn science.

It remains a puzzle.

There is a lot of talk about STEM instruction these days. In most districts, science doesn't get serious until middle school. US schools could be doing a whole lot more with more time devoted to science instruction.

I'll have more to say about time in elementary classrooms next week.NICHD Early Child Care Research Network (2002). The relation of global first-grade classroom environment to structural classroom features and teacher and student behaviors. The Elementary School Journal, 102, 367-387.

NICHD Early Child Care Research Network (2005). A day in third grade: A large-scale study of classroom quality and teacher and student behavior.The Elementary School Journal, 105, 305-323.

I'm not that surprised by the data -- your supposition that mornings are used for ELA and math is consistent with what I've seen in my (relatively minimal) time in elementary classrooms in the last 20 years. Both science and history are dipped into, but on a minimal basis.

Ironically, my experience is that third- and fourth-graders love a mythbusting (okay, basic deconstructionist) approach to both subjects, whether "grossology"/Mythbusters-explosion style in science or the "real story behind the pap you've gotten thus far" approach in history. (The engagement when I've led class discussions on the Montgomery Bus Boycott is NOT due to any stellar elementary-aged teaching skills of mine, I assure you.)

There are similar findings going back a century. See this post (and be sure to click on the images to magnify them.) http://stuartbuck.blogspot.com/2011/05/are-schools-teaching-too-much-math-and.html

Peter Gøthgen

3/2/2012 03:23:04 pm

The cynical part of me is thinking that the less time lower grade teachers spend on science, the less incorrect information later teachers have to correct.

EB

3/3/2012 07:53:29 am

A fair amount of science and history get taught during ELA, in a good program. But yes, dedicated time for those subjects is rare. Not as rare as it was in the '50's, when the sum total of the science instruction I received was making a volcano out of paper mache. Then sputnik went up and school districts hired science specialists to go around and try to help the K-6 teachers teach science. And yet -- don't know how to explain this -- Grades 7 and 8 science teachers made up for lost time. By HS, is was not a problem to teach kids fairly rigorous biology, chemistry, and physics.

@Peter @ Sherman: right, there's every indication that this is nothing new, and US kids knowledge and skills, historically, fits with that.
@EB I hope to say something about this later this week.

JC

3/4/2012 02:42:05 am

The US ranks 23rd in the PISA science exam, so American kids are actually doing really badly on an international level. The TIMSS tests are pretty basic and from what I understand a lot of high performing countries don't bother participating in them.

@JC: big question, why is PISA so much lower? Some argue it's because it's more "applied." I'm not much impressed by the distinction. You still work at a desk, alone, without access to reference works, etc. I think it's part of a more general pattern that US schools emphasize the basic so much; we look ok in lower grades, but it comes back to haunt us in h.s.

JC

3/5/2012 10:11:31 am

Daniel,

Some of the high performing PISA countries don't participate in TIMSS (although I think the number of participating countries did increase for the most recent test). But I did read some dismissive comments about TIMSS in the past along the lines of the tests being too easy for the grades tested. I feel that the TIMSS test (at least the 4th grade test) is way too easy. I had my homeschooled 1st grader take a practice test and she got 75% of the answers right (see http://www.edinformatics.com/timss/timss_intro.htm).

I've noticed that some top 10 PISA countries underperform the US on the TIMSS test. Australia, the Czech Republic and the Netherlands were all in the top 10 for PISA (the US was 21) but underperformed the US on TIMSS (both on the 4th and 8th grade tests). So, it does make me wonder if there is a difference between the tests that gives an advantage to the US on TIMSS but a disadvantage on PISA.

Someone suggested to me once that students in other countries take few or no multiple choice tests. They suggested that US students may have far more experience with them. PISA does have multiple choice as well but not on all questions. If you look at sample PISA questions, you will see that a lot of the questions are longer and require a lot more understanding of the concepts than TIMSS does.

I'm not why students in a top 10 PISA country would do worse on an easier test. Maybe how they do sampling somehow influences results. But it's something I have been curious about for a while.

Zeev Wurman

3/5/2012 07:33:26 pm

@JC: A nice comparison highlighting the PISA/TIMSS differences in math can be found here: https://edsurveys.rti.org/PISA/documents/WuA_Critical_Comparison_of_the_Contents_of_PISA_and_TIMSS_psg_WU_06.1.pdf

Science seems very similar -- PISA seems to use much more common-sense and informal thinking, while TIMSS has a larger focus on curricular content. Another point to observe is the huge difference in verbosity of many items between PISA and TIMSS. This must hurt language learners and cultures when the translations tend to get tangled.

Bonnie Daley

3/26/2012 10:36:13 am

Well, when the results of the March Madness games are more important than the latest scientific discoveries, what do you expect from our society? Science learning is distrusted, hated, laughed at and ridiculed. Of course, if we had a scientifically knowledgeable society, corporations and drug companies wouldn't be able to keep pulling the wool over our eyes. Greed loves ignorance.